BOK Chief — The Ultimate Korean Workaholic?

In South Korea, a country that worked itself out of acute postwar poverty into prosperity, long working hours are still seen as a virtue by many, particularly the older generation.

SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg News

Kim Choong-soo, governor of the Bank of Korea

Even so, Bank of Korea Gov. Kim Choong-soo, 63, is viewed as something of an extreme case by some BOK officials and outsiders.

During a recent dinner with the press to commemorate his first anniversary as central bank chief, Mr. Kim reiterated his longtime guiding motto: “It’s not even worth chatting with someone who hasn’t had the experience of working for at least three nights in a row to achieve something.”

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“I don’t understand people who don’t work hard enough,” he said. “No one works for others; they all work for themselves…I haven’t seen anyone die from working too hard. People die from drinking too much, smoking too much. They never die from working too much,” he said.

His argument is that if you work intensively for an extended period of time, you can achieve more and “improve your genuine ability,” as he puts it.

“Even if you work eight hours a day regularly, in 30 years you’ll stand exactly where you stand now. No improvement. It may be better to work for 24 hours straight and have two days off and then again work for 24 hours and take two days off,” he said.

South Koreans put in longer working hours than any other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — an average 2,074 hours a year among paid workers, according to 2009 OECD data, the latest available.

Meanwhile, Korea’s workforce productivity in 2009 was lower than that of most OECD member nations. The country’s per-capita labor productivity was $56,374, which ranked Korea 23rd among the 31-member OECD, according to a research jointly carried out by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and Korea Productivity Center. Labor productivity is usually inversely proportional to working hours.

Mr. Kim, who was Korea’s ambassador to the OECD before he took the helm of the BOK last April, has also served as the head of Korea’s state-run think-tank Korea Development Institute. He recalled being tough on the people he worked with in his previous posts.

“As OECD ambassador, I often dropped by the office at Sunday midnight to see how many people were at work. Many people who worked with me at that time have succeeded in their lives,” he said.

Asked by a reporter about some BOK officials referring to him as “a vicious employer,” Kim said: “I’m not. A vicious employer accumulates more money by sweating his workers. My salary is set. I don’t get paid more money by asking people here to work harder.”